Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Ben Lowy is a Prophet

The New York Times has an interview between photographer Ben Lowy and James Estrin in which they discuss mobile phone photography. The full article is definitely worth the read, but these words stood out for me:

I think there are a lot of purists out there. It’s just
like, when people didn’t accept Eggleston’s color photography and said you
can’t do art with color. They couldn’t move on and were unwilling to accept
this as a new form of communication, of art. I think that’s the same thing with
iPhone photography.

The idea of using a tool that everyone and their brother and
their mother has can make some people feel less exclusive. You know, art is
only that rare stuff that certain people in certain circles can get and that
rarity is what makes it art (emphasis added).

To expand on that a bit, so many artists I have known or met get so caught up in their own agendas that they forget that the world is turning around them. I'm not saying that to be relevant an artist needs to choose among the latest technologies or methods. I am saying, however, that once an artist gets trapped in a certain framework of making that he or she becomes completely closed off to experience, new or otherwise.